"Don't worry, Finn," Roslyn said. "You'll look wonderful no matter what. After all, it's not the suit that makes the man. It's the man who makes the suit. Isn't that what they say?"
Finn preened at her words. Roslyn tended to have that effect on men. I turned around to look at the vampire. Roslyn smiled and shrugged her shoulders. Amusement glinted in her toffee-colored eyes.
"Look at the crowd," Bria murmured from the backseat, peering through the window at the folks streaming past the car. "I didn't think this many people would show up. Did everybody in Ashland decide to come here today?"
"Probably everyone in the underworld," I said. "You know the old saying: 'The queen is dead. Long live the queen.'"
The five of us got out of the car. Sophia and Jo-Jo walked over to us, and then we all fell in step with the hundreds of people who had gathered to pay their respects.
My boots sank into the thick, soft grass and I breathed in, enjoying the rich smell of the earth. Maple, poplar, and sycamore trees stretched toward the cloudless cerulean sky, their brown branches already budding out with new leaves and providing a bit of shade for the crowd below. It was warm for this early in March, and there would be more cold days to come, but I tilted my face up, welcoming the sunshine and the promise of spring in the air - small things I appreciated more than ever this year, since I'd spent the last few weeks cooped up indoors. Yes, all in all, this was a beautiful day and a pretty spot - for a cemetery.
Ashland Memorial Cemetery spread out over about two square miles, tombstones and grave markers looking like dull silver needles sticking up out of the rolling green landscape before the monuments ended and the rocky ridges of the Appalachian Mountains took over. The cemetery was located in Northtown, the part of the city that the rich and powerful called home, and those were the folks who were buried here, each one with a marker that was bigger and more intricately carved than the last. Competition among the rich just never seemed to end in Ashland, not even in death.
We headed deeper into the cemetery, and I reached out with my Stone magic, listening to the whispers of the tombstones around us. Murmurs of old tears, old hurts and griefs, mixed with newer, rawer emotions echoed back to me. Common enough sounds in a place like this, although I also heard several notes of unease and worry rippling through the tombstones, reflecting the feelings of those who had gathered here today - something else I'd expected. With Mab gone, no one in the underworld knew quite what to do, now that her fiery fist wasn't poised over their heads, ready to crush, burn, and grind them into ashes at any moment.
The crowd was exactly what I'd expected it to be. I spotted many of the Ashland crime bosses milling around, folks like Phillip Kincaid, who owned the Delta Queen riverboat casino. Despite the occasion and the somber suit he wore, Kincaid had a cold, calculating smile on his face. In fact, most everyone was smiling and chatting with their neighbors, even the folks who'd been in business with Mab . . . well, if sharks showing their teeth could be considered smiling. With the Fire elemental gone, it was clear that it was a brand-new day in Ashland. I just wondered how I fit into things now.
However, there was one person who wasn't smiling - Jonah McAllister. The lawyer was one of those who'd chosen to sit in the red plush chairs that had been set up on the grass. McAllister sat alone in the front row of chairs, staring straight ahead, his unnaturally smooth face even blanker than usual. Mab didn't have any living relatives that I knew of, and with Elliot Slater, her other number two man dead, I guessed McAllister was the closest thing she'd had to family - or even just a friend. Hence his position in the first row of chairs.
All of the chairs had already been taken, except for the empty ones around McAllister that were reserved for those closest to the dead; but the rest of the crowd had spread out in a semicircle, so we were able to find a spot in the ring of people and see what was happening. Not much, since everyone was busy staring at the closed ebony coffin that stood in the middle of them all.
Mab Monroe might be dead, but she was once again the center of attention.
As she should be, at her own funeral.
Mab's funeral. I'd never thought I'd live to see this day. But here I was - and Mab too. Both of us together again, for the final time.
Maybe it was morbid of me to attend the funeral of the woman I'd killed. Maybe it was impolite or in poor taste or just downright mean. I'd never come to the funerals of any of the other people I'd assassinated as the Spider . . . well, except to do recon on or take out another target. No doubt some folks would think that I'd come here today just to thumb my nose at Mab one last time before she was officially six feet under.
But that wasn't the case. I hadn't come here to mock Mab: I'd come to say good-bye to her.
In her own brutal way, the Fire elemental had been a part of my life since I was thirteen, and even more so these past few months while I'd been plotting how to take her down. Now that she was gone, I felt her absence, and I wanted to make my peace with the role she'd played in my life - and finally move on. In fairy tales, people always lived happily ever after once the witch was dead. They faded to black with everyone happy and smiling. It was a nice thought, but those things couldn't last forever, and I wanted to know what came next.
The others had told me that Mab was dead, and I'd seen the news reports myself. In fact, the Fire elemental's demise was all that the media in Ashland had talked about for the last few weeks, given how sudden and violently she had died. The fact that it had taken the coroner's office so long to positively identify her body had only added to the speculation and media frenzy.
But part of me had needed to come here today and see it for myself: I had to see for myself that Mab was truly, finally dead.
The ebony coffin was closed - not surprising, given the fact that my Ice and Stone magic had wreaked just as much havoc on her body as her elemental Fire had on mine. Finn had told me that Mab had pretty much been reduced to charred bones during our duel as the cold and hot flames of our respective magics washed over her.
However, a portrait of Mab stood on an easel next to the coffin, showing the Fire elemental in all her glory: hair as bright as copper, black eyes, creamy skin, a necklace ringing her throat. My gaze fixed on the necklace, which was shaped like a sunburst, the symbol for fire, the rune that had been Mab's personal symbol. The necklace had actually survived our duel, but I'd used my Ice magic to smash it into a hundred pieces.
I'd hoped I would never see that rune again, but I couldn't escape it, because the symbol was on the coffin as well.