The click of the gun surprised me.
So did the woman who stepped out of the woods twenty feet ahead of me. Thin, wiry body, gray hair, nut brown skin, pale blue eyes. I recognized her. Ruth Gentry, the woman who'd spoken up during the predinner festivities inside Mab's mansion.
Now she had a revolver leveled at my chest. The gun was a big, old-fashioned piece, with the kind of fancy pearl finish you see in western movies. It glinted in the moonlight through her fingers, looking as bright as a star against the dark, weather-worn quality of her skin.
"That's far enough," Gentry said in the same pleasant voice she'd used with Mab earlier. "Stop right there."
I did as she asked, even though I wasn't particularly scared of her and her revolver. The silverstone in the vest that I had on underneath my gray clothes would catch any projectile that thunked into it. The magical metal was better than Kevlar for blocking bullets. Plus, I could always use my Stone magic to harden my skin once more.
Instead, I stood there, stared at the older woman, and struggled to make sense of things. Like how she'd gotten here ahead of me. I retraced my steps in my head, wondering how I'd been so stupid, so slow, as to let someone cut off my escape route.
The giants and the traps in the woods, I realized. I'd spent far too many precious minutes fighting them and skirting around the magical trip wires, which had let Ruth Gentry get in front of me. And now she was standing between me and my freedom.
My hands tightened around the bloody knives in my hands, so hard that I could feel the tiny spider runes stamped into the hilts press against the larger scars embedded in my palms. Not for long.
I could tell by the way her blue eyes stayed on mine and her slow, steady steps toward me that this wasn't Gentry's first time facing down someone like me. She wouldn't be arrogant and assume that just because she'd gotten the drop on me she'd won. She wouldn't give me an opening to use my knives-unless I made her.
"How did you know that I'd come this way?" I asked, even as I kept both ears open, listening for sounds of pursuit behind me.
Gentry stopped about ten feet in front of me, the revolver still aimed at my chest. Sometime between my seeing her in the dining room and then again out here, she'd put a heavy coat on over her dress. The wool fabric was just as worn and faded as her gown, and the leather boots on her feet were cracked from age and wear. Still, despite her rather shabby appearance, she'd come to Mab's for a fancy dinner party and had then been prepared enough to tromp through the woods after me on a second's notice. She was a thinker, then, a planner, which made her that much more dangerous.
She smiled, as though she was delighted by my question. "I guessed."
I raised an eyebrow, even though she couldn't see it behind the gray ski mask that covered my face. "You guessed? You must be one hell of a good guesser."
Gentry shrugged. "Oh, that was just something to say. There wasn't much guesswork to it really. This end of the forest offers the quickest, most direct route out to the main road. It's the way I would have come tonight, if I'd been in your shoes."
Her logic and reasoning were spot-on, although I didn't compliment her on them. Instead, I stared at her speckled hand and the easy, familiar way she held her revolver, like it was an old friend she didn't want to let go of. Gentry definitely knew how to use that gun. Her shots wouldn't go wide like the others fired at me earlier tonight-especially not at this short distance.
Gentry gave me a thoughtful look. "I don't think that I would have missed Mab, though. Risky, taking a shot like that when there was someone else that close by. You should have waited, at least a few more seconds. Guy was shifting on his feet. Easy to tell that he wasn't going to keep still much longer."
I shrugged. She was right, but I wasn't going to give the old woman the satisfaction of agreeing with her.
She stared at me, peering closely, as if she could somehow see through my ski mask and get a look at my true self-Gin Blanco. Even more interesting was that Gentry seemed rather hesitant to pull the trigger on her revolver. I didn't know why she hadn't plugged me full of holes yet, or at least tried to, but that hesitation was going to cost her-her life.
Gentry finally came to some sort of decision about whatever she'd been contemplating because she gave me a regretful shake of her head.
"Well," she said. "Why don't you turn around, and we'll start marching the other way back toward the mansion-"
And that's when I made my move.
I turned around like I was going to obey her, then pivoted back the other way and threw myself at the other woman. But Gentry was even smarter than I'd thought, because she'd been expecting the bluff. She got three shots off-a tight kill cluster, all of which caught in the silver-stone vest on my chest-before I tackled her and drove her to the ground. The snow cushioned our fall, and Gentry fought back. She tried to club me with the butt of her revolver, but I slapped it away. With my other hand, I brought my silverstone knife up against her neck. Gentry had the good sense to stop before I slit her throat. Something that I was going to do anyway in another minute, two tops.
We lay there on the ground, me on top of her, both of us breathing hard, surrounded by the frosty, foggy cloud of our own exertions. And then, for some reason, Gentry chuckled, as if she was pleased to be an inch away from her own death at the edge of my blade.
"Damn," she drawled, a deep southern twang coloring her voice. "You're just as good as they say you are, Spider. But I'm good at what I do too. Gotta be in this line of work or you don't last long."
My eyes narrowed. "And what line of work would that be-"
Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
For the third time tonight, something surprised me when it shouldn't have.
Four bullets sliced through the air. One zipped by my face, so close to my cheek that I could feel the heat radiating off it, before disappearing into the darkness. The other three were a bit more problematic. Two thudded into my left arm, instantly numbing it, while the third slammed into my upper thigh.
The impacts knocked me back, and I hissed with pain. While I was off balance, Gentry got her hands in between us, shoved me away, and scrambled over the ground toward her revolver.
I rolled backward away from Gentry, my body flattening the snowdrifts, before coming up into a low crouch. Ribbons of fire spread out from my wounds, moving downward through my left arm and leg. I gritted my teeth and bit back a snarling curse. Fuck. I hated getting shot.
But I was already pushing away the pain, forcing it to the back of my mind, because I had something else to worry about-where those bullets had come from. My head snapped to the left, backtracking the projectiles' paths.