Fletcher had been flayed alive by magic.
And the Air elemental had kept right on torturing Fletcher, even after he was dead.
That was the only way to explain all the missing skin. All the gruesome blisters and horrid bubbles of flesh. There were so, so many of them. All causing more pain than most folks experienced in a lifetime.
It turned my stomach.
I might have killed people, but I usually ended their lives quickly. A single wound.
Two at the most. Quick, sure, accurate. This ... somebody had taken extreme pleasure in this. Glee. Joy, even.
My vision blurred. Something burned in my eyes. Crying. I was crying. Something I hadn't done in seventeen years. I drew in a breath and exhaled a sob. My body shook.
My lips trembled. A curious lightness filled my head. I couldn't look at Fletcher. Not now. Not when I was so close to losing control. To giving in to this emotional weakness.
I hunkered down on my ankles and forced myself to take deep breaths. To focus on drawing the air deep into my lungs and down into the pit of my roiling stomach. As though that was the most important thing in the world. As though Fletcher wasn't lying a foot in front of me. Dead.
When I'd come back to myself, I opened my gray eyes and stared at the repulsive wounds. Not as a person who'd just discovered a horrific murder. Not as the woman who'd just lost her mentor, the old man she'd loved. And definitely not as Gin, whose shredded heart had just been sliced up and dumped onto a plate like shoestring french fries.
No, I examined the wounds as an assassin, as the Spider. Cold. Clinical. Detached.
Determined to learn what I could from them.
And I found something. The elemental who'd burned Fletcher was a woman, someone with slender, delicate hands, judging from the dainty size of the fist over Fletcher's heart. I balled up my own hand in comparison. Hers was smaller.
The fact that a woman had tortured Fletcher didn't surprise me. I'd learned long ago the fairer sex was much more vicious than men-and much more patient. This one, this sadistic bitch ... she'd reveled in torturing Fletcher. In using her magic to hurt him. In slowly flaying him alive. In hearing him scream for mercy until his throat was as red as his raw skin.
And she was going to pay for it. More than she'd ever f**king imagined.
Whatever else happened tonight, whether Finn was dead or alive, I wasn't running.
Not from this. Not from her. I wasn't skipping town and lying low in some foreign country for a while. Ashland might not be the most pleasant place, but it was home.
More importantly, the Pork Pit was home, as crazy as that sounded. I wasn't leaving it behind. Not like this. Not with Fletcher's blood covering the floor like a fresh coat of wax.
I held my breath, waiting for Fletcher to turn his head, open his dull green eyes, and grouse at me for keeping him waiting. But he didn't do that. And he never would again.
The bitch who'd done this was going to pay for that.
I needed to go. Needed to move. Needed to get to Finn, if it wasn't already too late.
But I couldn't tear myself away from Fletcher's body.
He was the one who'd taken me in off the streets when I'd had nowhere else to go.
Who'd rescued me from fighting the rats for garbage to eat. Saved me from selling my body to the vampire pimps. Taught me how to be strong. Showed me how to survive-and live with what I had to do to stay that way.
As I crouched there over Fletcher's bloody body, a faint scuffle sounded. A slight, scraping noise that intruded upon my grief. More than enough to snap my cold, calm control back into place. A shadow fell over the pools of Fletcher's drying blood, turning the crimson puddles an inky black.
Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
My fingers tightened around the knife in my hand. I turned and whirled it at the man behind me. The metal flashed through the air and sank into his right arm. He howled in pain and lunged at me, slashing with a switchblade. I sidestepped his clumsy, awkward blow. Using his own momentum, I shoved the man forward. He crashed into the counter and fell to the floor. I leaped on him and knocked the blade out of his hand. I straddled the man, crushing his ribs between my knees.
I didn't care about the wound throbbing in my shoulder or the burning nick on my arm. Didn't think about the cold that just wouldn't leave my body or the exhaustion slowing my movements. I just hit him-over and over and over, smashing my tight knuckles into his face until the skin on my hands broke and bled.
It felt good to hurt him. So f**king good.
The man moaned and mumbled with pain. I forced myself to stop before I killed him.
Not yet. I drew in a ragged breath. The metallic scent of his blood pooled in my mouth like saliva, making me hunger for more. I yanked my knife out of the man's arm. He snarled. I leaned forward and pressed my forearm against his throat, cutting off his oxygen.
I brought the bloody tip up where he could see it. "You will tell me everything that happened in this room tonight. You will tell me who you're working for, what her plans are. You will tell me anything I want to know and be glad to do it."
"And why ... is that ... bitch?" the man spat out.
I leaned forward until my gray eyes were directly over his.
"Because the first cut won't kill you," I said in a calm, dead voice. "Nor the second, nor the third, nor even the tenth. But you will wish to all the spirits you pray to that they had."
Chapter Seven
I didn't get a specific name or much useful information out of him. I was too angry and in too much of a hurry to use the finesse needed for those sorts of things. Besides, he was just the help, dispatched to do one final check to see if I'd show up at the restaurant. He'd seen the open back door and followed me inside. But the man confirmed my suspicion-Finnegan was next. Which meant I had to move if I had any hope of saving him.
As much as it hurt, I left Fletcher's body where it was behind the counter. Sophia Deveraux, the dwarven cook who came in early every morning to bake the sourdough bread for the day's sandwiches, would find Fletcher. She'd call the cops. Given the debris and overturned cash register, the police would think it was a robbery gone wrong. That's what they thought every crime was in Ashland. Fletcher would be just another statistic, another case file, another unsolved murder among hundreds every year.
Before I left the restaurant, I washed the blood off my hands and face, along with my tears. I also dragged the dead man's body to the cold storage room and dumped him in one of the empty freezers. I taped a pink sticky note to the top of the appliance to catch Sophia's eye. She'd know what to do with the body. The dwarf was Fletcher's go-to gall for disposal work.
I reached behind a different freezer and pulled out a black duffel bag, one of several I had stashed in various spots throughout the city. Money, cell phones, credit cards, weapons, fake IDs, makeup, a few clothes. Everything I needed to make a quick getaway, change my appearance, or do an unexpected, dirty job.