Jennifer Estep - Poison Promise

She realized that I was staring at her, and a small smile split her crimson lips, revealing her perfect white teeth. She returned my stare with one of her own, seeming deep in thought, before nodding at me. Then she turned back to the giant, leaned forward, and murmured something to her friend. The giant’s flat gaze flicked to me for a few seconds before she too leaned forward. Soon the two women were engrossed in their conversation and not paying any attention to me at all.

That should have reassured me, but it didn’t.

I frowned. Something about the woman’s soft smile and thoughtful expression nagged at me, making me think maybe I’d seen her somewhere before, somewhere important, somewhere that I should remember—

“Problem?” Sophia rasped.

The Goth dwarf was standing off to my right and stirring the pot of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce that was bubbling away on one of the stoves, flavoring the air with its rich, smoky mix of cumin, black pepper, and other spices. Sophia had noticed my keen interest in our new customers.

I kept staring at the two women. They both ignored me completely, which made more and more alarm bells start going off in my head. The only people who did that to me in my own restaurant were the ones who had some sort of sinister and dastardly plans for my demise.

By this point, the two mystery women had given Catalina their order of cheeseburgers, sweet-potato fries, and macaroni salad and were talking softly to each other in between checking their phones. Neither one of them so much as glanced in my direction, but I felt like they were aware of me all the same.

I hopped off my stool, went over to the counter close to where Sophia was standing by the stoves, and started slicing veggies for the rest of the day’s sandwiches. As I whacked my way through a red onion, I subtly tilted my head in the direction of the two women.

“You ever see them in here before?”

Sophia matched my casual cool move for move, reaching over and grabbing a ladle for the barbecue sauce as though she weren’t really eyeing the women.

“No,” she replied, sticking the ladle in the sauce. “Giant looks strong, though.”

“Do me a favor. See if you can snap a photo of them before they leave, and send it to Finn. Maybe he knows who they are.”

Sophia grunted her agreement, and we both went back to work.

An hour later, the two women had finally finished their meal and pushed their plates away. Sophia chose that moment to stroll back to the restrooms, tapping her fingers on her phone as though she were texting. She discreetly angled the phone at the women as she passed them, then finished her text and slid the device into the back pocket of her jeans before disappearing into the bathroom. She didn’t give me a thumbs-up, but I knew she’d gotten shots of them.

The two women slid out of the booth. I thought that they might come over to the cash register to pay for their food and make some not-so-veiled threats about ending my existence. But instead, the giant threw several bills down onto the table, then opened the front door for the other woman.

The two of them strolled outside. A black Audi with tinted windows pulled up to the curb, and the giant opened the back door for the auburn-haired woman. A few seconds later, they were both inside the vehicle and cruising away to parts unknown.

Even though they had left and nothing had happened, the strange tension I’d felt ever since they’d stepped into the restaurant didn’t ease. I went over to their booth and peered out the windows, but the car and the women were long gone. Maybe they’d just wanted a hot meal and nothing else. Maybe they hadn’t had any hidden agenda for eating in my restaurant. Maybe I was just being overly paranoid—even for me.

I sighed and grabbed the plate that the auburn-haired woman had been using, along with her silverware.

The second my hand closed around her fork, a burning sensation shot through my skin, as though the silverware were red-hot.

I was so surprised that I dropped the utensil. It clattered to the floor with a loud, reverberating bang , almost as if someone had fired a gun inside the restaurant. Everyone turned to look at me—the other customers, Catalina, even Sophia, who had stepped out of the restroom. But I ignored their curious gazes and focused on the fork, expecting to see some sort of elemental Fire rune flare to life on the handle and wondering if I could reach for my Stone magic, use it to harden my skin, and throw myself down on top of it in time to protect everyone else from the upcoming blast of magic—

But nothing happened.

No runes, no Fire, no magic, no explosions, nothing that would indicate that the fork was anything other than a fork.

Catalina stopped her wipe-down of the next table over. “Gin?” she asked in the same cautious voice she’d been using with me all day. “Is something wrong?”

I shook my head. “Nah. It’s nothing. Just a case of butterfingers.”

Catalina gave me a strange look, like she didn’t believe me, but she finished wiping down the table, then moved over to the next one. The customers went back to their food and conversations, and Sophia returned to the stoves, although she raised her black eyebrows at me as she passed. I shook my head at her, then crouched down on the floor, still staring at the fork.

Folks had left me all sorts of nasty surprises in and around the Pork Pit these past few months. Everything from saw-shaped runes frosted into the doors that would spew out razor-sharp needles of elemental Ice when someone tried to open them, to trip-wires strung across the alley floor that would trigger a double-gauge shotgun, to good old-fashioned ticking time bombs hidden in the backs of the restroom toilets. No one had tried to booby-trap the silverware yet, although I supposed it was only a matter of time before someone thought of it.

But I wasn’t going to find out what was wrong by just staring at the fork, so I drew in a breath, reached out, and carefully picked it up again. Once more, it burned my hand, although the sensation was much fainter now. Whatever had made the metal feel like it was scorching my skin was slowly fading away, like warmth quickly seeping from a pan that had been taken out of a hot oven, but I’d been right about what had caused the sensation.

Magic—elemental magic.

I wrapped my hand around the metal and concentrated, trying to identify what kind of magic it was, but it didn’t feel like the Fire power that I’d expected it to be. Otherwise, hot, invisible pins and needles would have been stabbing into my skin, and I would have experienced a similar sensation if it had been Air magic. The faint, steady burn wasn’t cold or hard, so it wasn’t Ice or Stone magic either, the two areas I was gifted in, and it didn’t feel like some offshoot power like water or electricity.

I frowned. The auburn-haired woman was definitely an elemental, and her power—whatever it was—must have somehow soaked into the fork while she’d been eating. That was the only explanation that made sense, since some elementals constantly gave off invisible waves of magic, even when they weren’t actively using their power. But whatever her magic was, it was something I’d never felt before.

And that worried me more than anything else.

A few more customers came into the restaurant, but it looked like it was going to be a slow night, so I decided to close early.

Besides, I wanted to go home and go through Fletcher’s files to see if there was any mention of the auburn-haired woman and her giant friend. The two of them hadn’t said a single word to me, but I couldn’t help but think that they were a dangerous threat all the same. Folks always said that animals could sniff out evil, and I’d gotten pretty good at it myself these past few months. I’d had to, in order to survive.