"Come on. Be serious. Look at it again."
He peered at it. "A tooth. No, wait, that could be a rune. A tooth ... the symbol for strength and prosperity. You think an elemental is involved in this?" Finn's gaze flicked to the three drawings on my mantle. The snowflake, the ivy vine, the primrose. The symbols of my dead family. His green eyes dropped to my hand and the spider runes burned into my palms. Finn knew I was a Stone and Ice elemental, although I'd never told him anything about my family. But I was sure Finn had researched the runes I'd drawn and found out who they belonged to. Information was like an aphrodisiac to Finn. Uncovering people's secrets an amusing game.
Fletcher had been the same way. But neither one of them had ever asked me about the runes or my past.
Don't ask, don't tell. The only rule the three of us had had.
"Yeah, an elemental's involved in this."
"How do you know?" Finn asked.
"There was some damage at the Pork Pit. Overturned tables, broken chairs, busted windows, like a tornado had ripped through the storefront. Looked like Air elemental damage to me." A smooth, easy lie. "But I've never seen this exact symbol before, and I know the runes of all the major elemental families in Ashland."
The extremely rich elementals, anyway. They were the only ones who could afford my services. Their feuds alone could have kept me busy the rest of my life. Members of opposing elemental families, like Stone and Air or Fire and Ice, rarely mixed unless forced to by business or the occasional ill-fated Romeo and Juliet love affair. Those elementals were always jockeying for position, money, power, along with the wealthy humans, vampires, giants, and dwarves who comprised the city's upper crust. If the elementals couldn't get what they wanted with money, they used their magic, often with vicious results. The others did too. Duels at dawn were not uncommon in the city. When that failed, well, that's when they hired someone like me to clean up the mess.
The weaker elementals and other magic users of more modest means led simpler lives. They worked jobs and put their kids through school. Lived out in the cleaner suburbs and drove minivans to ballet class. Some of them rarely used their power at all.
In contrast, the poor and the downtrodden elementals used their magic the most.
They performed parlor tricks on the street corner for the amusement of passersby and spare change to feed whatever habit they had. Drugs, booze, sex, blood. The constant struggle to survive and use of their magic burned them out-or drove them crazy. I'd seen more than one psychotic elemental during my stay in Ashland Asylum.
Magic had that affect on some people, some elementals. Using their power gave them a high better than alcohol, better than drugs, until they were hooked on it. But elementals were much more dangerous than your common junkies, because they'd lost control but still had all that raw magic running through their veins.
"Well, it's not a sunburst, so it's not Mab Monroe's symbol," Finn said.
I thought of the rune I'd seen on Mab's necklace earlier tonight. A sunburst. A ruby surrounded by gold, curled, wavy lines. So much like my own spider rune, but so different.
"I don't know," I murmured. "She could be involved in this. Gordon Giles did work for one of her companies. Maybe Mab found out he was doing something she didn't approve of. Rumor has it she killed the previous head of the company, the James sisters' father, for making too many waves when she took over."
"And so Mab did what?" Finn scoffed. "Hired you to take care of it, then decided to take care of you? Doesn't make sense. You just said it yourself. Mab's never been afraid of getting her hands dirty. Everybody knows she killed that federal judge three months ago because he was merely thinking about trying to indict her. If Mab didn't like whatever Gordon Giles was up to, she would have taken care of it herself. Not set you up to take the fall."
Finn was right. Mab Monroe ran this town. She wouldn't have cared about getting caught. She would have killed Gordon Giles, stood over his body, and blown off her smoking fingers in front of everyone at the opera house. No, Mab Monroe hadn't gotten to where she was by being sneaky. This was someone else's handiwork.
Someone who didn't have the guts to accept the consequences of her actions.
Cowardly bitch.
"We can't rule Mab out completely. But she's probably not the one pulling the strings." "Who does that leave us with?" Finn asked.
I shrugged. "Most of our clients are motivated by sex, money, or revenge. According to Fletcher's file, Gordon
Giles didn't have a wife or steady girlfriend. He preferred to buy and pay for his sexual entertainment."
"Hookers?"
I nodded. "Hookers. Lots of them. But no hooker in her right mind would promise to pay me five mill to kill Giles. Only a few would even be able to put their hands on enough money for the down payment, much less the back end. So that pretty much rules out sex as a motive. Fletcher said Giles was stealing money, so I'd have to go with Haley James."
"His boss at Halo Industries?"
I nodded again. "She could have found out about the embezzling and decided to kill Giles rather than let the info go public. It wouldn't be good for her company if word got out she was being bilked by her top paper pusher."
"Maybe. But Giles dying any sort of way isn't going to look good for Halo Industries.
And embezzling is down the list as far as crimes go. We need more information." Finn looked at the jet tooth again. "A tooth rune ... that could be any elemental.
Stone, Air, Fire, Ice. Or even someone with a minor talent for metal or water or something else. It's not specific enough."
Most elementals chose runes that represented their magic. Like my mother's snowflake for her Ice magic, or Mab Monroe's sunburst for her Fire power. A tooth would be better suited for a vampire, for obvious reasons. Finn was right. There was no way to tell which kind of elemental it belonged to. The rune didn't mean anything in and of itself, just like they had no real power unless you created or imbued them with magic.
I might have dismissed the tooth rune as a mere trinket, if not for the gruesome way Fletcher had been tortured. I'd seen just about all the bad things people could do to each other, and I knew the signs of Air elemental magic when I saw them. Shortie had been working for someone. It made sense he would wear his employer's symbol, whoever she might be.
"We'll figure it out," I promised. "Let's see what else is here."
We went through the rest of the items. More fake IDs, a few credit cards, and several hundred bucks in cash. Nothing useful. The television droned on in the background while we worked. At five in the morning, the early news program blared on. The top story was the incident at the opera house. Finn and I sat on the couch and watched the spectacle.