Jennifer Estep: The Spider

The guy whipped around. He had started to take a step forward when I called out to him again.

“Wait. One more thing.”

He froze. He teetered on his feet, and I could almost see the wheels spinning in his mind as he debated making a break for the door. But he must have realized how foolish that would make him look, because he finally turned and faced me again. I crooked my finger at him. The guy swallowed again, but he eased back over to me, although he made sure to stay out of arm’s reach and keep the cash register between us. Very smart man.

By this point, my words and actions had attracted the attention of a few of the customers, who stared at me with wide eyes, as if I were going to whip out a knife and slice open the delivery guy right in front of them. Please. I preferred to be a little more discreet about such things, if only to keep up appearances.

I stared at the delivery guy for a few more seconds before reaching down and grabbing something just below the cash register. He swallowed a third time, and beads of sweat had formed on his forehead, despite the restaurant’s air-conditioning. I raised my hand, and he tensed up more.

I reached up and tucked a hundred-dollar bill into the pocket on the front of his coveralls.

“Have a nice day,” I said in a sweet voice.

The guy stared at me, his mouth gaping open, as if he couldn’t believe that I was sending him on his way without so much as a scratch on him. But he quickly got with the program. He nodded at me, his head snapping up and down, as he backed toward the door.

“Y’all come back now,” I called out. “Sometime when you have a chance to sit down and eat. The food here is terrific, in case you hadn’t heard.”

The delivery guy didn’t respond, but he kept his eyes on me until his ass hit the doorknob. Then he gulped down a breath, threw the door open, and dashed outside as fast as he could without actually running.

Owen raised an eyebrow at me. “I think you about gave that poor guy a heart attack.”

A grin curved my lips. “Serves him right for not being able to tell me what was in the package.”

His gaze flicked to the white box sitting off to the side. “You going to open that?”

“Later,” I murmured. “When we’re alone. If there is something nasty inside, there’s no use letting everyone see it.”

“And if it’s not something nasty?”

I snorted. “Then I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I’m not holding my breath about it, though.”

Owen finished his cheeseburger and onion rings and had a piece of cherry pie with vanilla bean ice cream for dessert, while I spent the next hour working. Slicing up more potatoes for the last of the day’s French fries. Checking on the pot of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce that was bubbling away on one of the back burners. Refilling drinks and ringing up orders.

I also took the package into the back and placed it in one of the freezers. I didn’t know what surprises the box might contain, but I didn’t want my staff or customers to get injured by whatever might be lurking inside.

Finally, around seven o’clock, the last of the customers paid up and left, and I decided to close the restaurant early for the night. I sent Sophia and the waitstaff home, turned off all the appliances, and flipped the sign over to Closed before locking the front door.

Now all that was left to do was open the box.

I carefully pulled it out of the freezer, took it into the storefront, and put it down on the counter in the same spot as before. I made Owen move to the other side of the restaurant, well out of range of any elemental Fire or other magic that might erupt from it. Then I bent down and peered at the package.

A shipping order was taped to the top, with my name and the Pork Pit’s address. But there was nothing on the slip of paper to tell me who might have sent the box or where it had come from. All of that information had been left blank, which only made me more suspicious about what might be inside.

And the box itself didn’t offer any more clues. It was simply a sturdy white box, long, rectangular, and about nine inches wide. No marks, runes, or symbols decorated the surface, not even so much as a manufacturer’s stamp to tell me who had made the box. I hesitated, then put my ear down close to the top and listened, in case someone had decided to put a bomb with an old-fashioned clock tick-tick-tick ing away inside. Stranger things had happened in my line of work.

But no sounds escaped from the container. No smells either, and I didn’t sense any elemental magic emanating from it.

“Anything?” Owen asked from his position by the front door.

I shook my head. “Nothing so far.”

The lid of the box had been taped down, so I palmed one of my knives and sliced through the material, careful not to jiggle the package any more than necessary. Then I waited, counting off the seconds in my head. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . forty-five . . . sixty . . .

After two minutes had passed, I was reasonably sure that nothing would happen until I actually opened the box.

“Here goes nothing,” I called out to Owen.

I slowly drew the top off the box and reached for my Stone magic, using it to harden my skin, head, hair, eyes, and any other part of me that might get caught in a blast from a bomb or any rune trap that might be hidden inside. A sunburst rune that would make elemental Fire explode in my face, a saw symbol that would send sharp, daggerlike needles of Ice shooting out at me, maybe even some sort of Air elemental cloud design that would suck all of the oxygen away from me and suffocate me on the spot.

But none of those things happened, and all I saw was a thick layer of white tissue paper wrapped around whatever was inside.

I carefully pushed one side of the paper out of the way, then the other, still holding on to my Stone power to protect myself from any possible problems. But to my surprise, the box held something innocuous after all: flowers.

Roses, to be exact—black roses.

I let go of my magic, my skin reverting back to its normal soft texture, and frowned, wondering who would send me roses. I picked up one of the flowers, mindful of the sharp, curved thorns sticking out from the stem, and turned the blossom around and around, as if it held some sort of clue that would tell me who had sent it and why.

And it did.

Because this wasn’t your typical rose. The stem was a milky white instead of the usual green, while the thorns were the same pale shade. But really, it was the petals that caught my attention, because they weren’t black so much as they were a deep, dark, vivid blue, a color that I’d only seen one place before.

“All clear,” I said.

Owen stepped over to the counter and looked into the box. “Roses? Somebody sent you roses?”

“It looks that way,” I murmured.

A white card was lying on top of the flowers, and I picked it up. Only two words were scrawled across the front in black ink and tight, cursive handwriting: Happy anniversary .

That was it. That was all the card said, and no other marks, runes, or symbols decorated the stationery.

I rubbed my fingers over the card. Not what I had expected it to say. Some sort of death threat would have been far more appropriate. Then again, I hadn’t thought that I’d get a package like this today either. But most troublesome was the fact that the two simple words gave me no clue to the writer’s tone, state of mind, or true meaning. The card, the message, the roses could have been anything from a simple greeting to the most biting sort of sarcasm. If I was betting, though, I’d put my money on sarcasm. Or perhaps a warning. Maybe even a promise of payback, retribution, revenge.