I stared at Bria. "Apparently, Mab has realized our familial connection-or at least suspects it-because she's put a bounty on your head as well. One million dollars. The only catch is that you have to be brought in alive. With me, she'll take whatever she can get."
Bria looked at me, her blue eyes dark and thoughtful. "She wants to use me as bait. To lure you out into the open so she can kill us both."
I shrugged. "That would be my guess. But it's not going to happen. I'm not going to let it happen. I promise you that, baby sister."
Anger tightened her battered features. "I don't need you to protect me, Gin. I'm a cop and an Ice elemental, remember? I've been taking care of myself for a long time now. I can handle a few bounty hunters."
I snorted. "This is more than a few bounty hunters. This is every toothless old geezer with a shotgun in the back of his pickup coming to Ashland gunning for us. Me, they haven't got much of a shot at, since I'm so good at being a ghost. But everybody in town knows your name, rank, and serial number, especially since the incident at the train yard right before Christmas. I'm just surprised it took them this long to get up enough gumption to come after a cop."
Bria shifted on the bumper of the SUV. Her bloody lips clamped down, like she was afraid that if she opened them she'd spill her guts about something she wasn't supposed to.
My eyes narrowed. "This is the first time that someone's tried to kidnap you, right? Because I know you would have told me if something like this had happened before."
For a moment, I thought that she wasn't going to answer me. But my cold, accusing gaze weighed down on her, cracking her resolve.
Bria sighed. "There was a guy two days ago when I was getting coffee over at the Cake Walk. He pulled a gun on me as I came out of the restaurant, forced me into a nearby alley, and told me that he was going to take me for a ride."
"What happened?"
Bria shrugged. "I waited until I was sure that there was no one else around who could get hurt, then threw my coffee in the bastard's face and took away his gun. While he was screaming from the pain and the second-degree burns, I cuffed his ass and hauled him down to the station. End of story."
Finn gave my sister a warm, admiring look. "Nice takedown, detective. Even if you should have found another way to do it. Don't you know that you never, ever waste a cup of coffee like that?"
Bria's brows drew together in confusion. She hadn't been around long enough yet to realize the dark, murky depths of Finn's caffeine addiction. She shook her head, pressed his silk handkerchief to the wound above her eye, and turned to look at me.
"And what about Jenkins?" she asked. "I assume that you caught up to him, since you're telling us all this."
There was more that she wanted to ask me. The question burned like a flare in her icy eyes. A lesser woman would have left it at that, especially when dealing with someone like the Spider, even if I was her sister. But Bria wasn't lacking for bravery or anything else in the toughness department.
"Did you kill Jenkins? After you questioned him?"
"Of course I killed him," I said. "He was a threat to you. He'd already sold you out once, and he would have been more than happy to do it again. I couldn't let him walk away. Nobody hurts the people that I care about and gets away with it-nobody."
Bria's mouth flattened into a hard line, and more anger iced over her eyes, but she didn't say anything else. She didn't argue with me about how what I'd done had been so wrong. About how I'd just killed someone in cold blood. About how she could have taken care of Jenkins by arresting him and letting him cool his heels in jail. But I could sense her disappointment in me. The chill of it radiated off her, an arctic front blasting me with her cold displeasure.
Finn stepped in between us. "I hate to interrupt this little debriefing, but in case y'all have forgotten, we're standing in a parking lot with several dead bodies. Something that would look a wee bit suspicious to even the most trusting soul. What do you want to do, Gin?"
"Yeah," Xavier chimed in, getting to his feet. "You want me to call it in? You going to leave your rune here for Mab to find?"
After I'd declared war on Mab, I'd started leaving my spider rune at the scenes of my crimes whenever I ambushed and killed the Fire elemental's men. Scratching the rune into the dirt, carving it into the side of a building, even drawing it in blood. I'd done all that and more because I'd wanted Mab to focus all her anger on me, and not think too much about the folks that I'd saved along the way, like Bria and Roslyn, and what their connection to me might be.
"I can do the whole song and dance," Roslyn volunteered. "You know, say that everyone was in the nightclub and no one heard a thing. Just like always."
I stared at the bodies that littered the parking lot. Ten minutes ago, the men had been full of vim and vigor. Now they were nothing, less than nothing, like yesterday's newspaper all crumpled up and thrown away.
"No," I said in a thoughtful voice. "I'm not going to leave my rune behind, and you guys aren't going to call it in. We're going to pretend like this never happened."
Bria frowned. "But why? What's different about tonight?"
"Because Mab has hired subcontractors," I said. "These aren't her men. Not really. But if I leave my rune behind and they realize that I stepped in to protect you, Mab will know that she's right about our connection. She'll tell the bounty hunters, and then there'll be a feeding frenzy, even more so than there is already. No, our friends here are going to disappear quietly. And I know just the Goth dwarf to make it happen."
Thanks to a call from Finn, Sophia Deveraux showed up about fifteen minutes later, driving her classic convertible.
As usual, the Goth dwarf wore black from head to toe. Only tonight, her ensemble consisted of a pair of work boots and long, heavy coveralls. The perfect outfit for disposing of a dead body. Or six in this case. While we'd waited for Sophia to show up, Xavier and I had walked over, retrieved Jenkins's body from the alley, and brought it back here to the parking lot. No need to make the dwarf trudge all that way, especially when the alley was still coated with the slippery elemental Ice that I'd created. She'd be busy enough here as it was.
"As you can see, things got a little more hectic than I expected tonight," I told Sophia.
"Hmph." The dwarf grunted in agreement as she surveyed the bodies.
"You need help with anything?"
Sophia rolled her black eyes and huffed, like I'd just insulted her. I suppose that I had. Like me, Sophia preferred to work alone, and she was damn good at her job. The Goth dwarf had been getting rid of bodies for Fletcher for years before I'd come along and taken over the assassination business from the old man.