1
“Someone has a birthday coming up.”
The voice in my ear rumbled in a low, slow way that was as sexy as all get-out, but I still grimaced at his words.
“Don’t remind me,” I grumbled. “I’ve been trying to forget about that particular date on the calendar for weeks now.”
Holding a backpack in one hand and my phone in the other, I stopped inside the doorway, letting the college students stream out of the classroom and move into the corridor. They hurried toward the exit, along with the professor, all eager to get away from the hallowed halls of learning as quickly as they could, but I stayed where I was until the sounds of their cheerful chatter had faded away and I could resume my own conversation.
“What’s so bad about turning thirty-one?” Owen asked.
Even though he couldn’t see me, since we were talking on the phone, I still shrugged as I stepped out of the classroom and ambled toward the doors at the end of the corridor.
“Nothing, on the face of it. It’s just another day and just another number. I won’t feel any different before, during, or after that day than I do on any other. But this time of year . . . bad things always seem to happen around my birthday.”
“Oh.” My lover’s voice slipped from sexy and teasing to quiet and serious in a heartbeat. He didn’t say anything else. He knew exactly what bad things I was referring to. My mother and my older sister being murdered. Thinking that Bria, my baby sister, had also been killed. Fletcher Lane, my mentor, being tortured to death.
“I just . . . don’t want to jinx things by talking about my birthday,” I said. “And I don’t even want to think about the surprise party Finn is planning.”
Silence.
“What party?” Owen finally asked, three seconds too late to be believable.
“The always party.”
“What?” he asked again, genuinely confused this time.
“The always party. The party that Finn always plans for me. The one I always tell him I would rather do without. The one the sneaky bastard always manages to surprise me with anyway, just when I think that I’m finally safe from him and his shenanigans.”
Finnegan Lane, my foster brother, thought that birthdays were a time of great celebration, jubilation, and excitement and should always be marked with cake, presents, and people hiding in a dark room waiting to jump out and scream at you the second you turned on the lights. I was fine with the cake and the presents, but people jumping and screaming in my direction always made me reach for one of my silverstone knives.
Such were the instincts of an assassin.
“He always manages to surprise you with a party?” Owen asked. “Every single year? I find that hard to believe.”
“Yeah, well, I am no match for the mercurial wiles of Finnegan Lane. Three years ago, he threw the party a week before my birthday. Two years ago, he waited until three weeks after my birthday.”
Last year had been the only one in the last ten that Finn hadn’t thrown me a party, since Fletcher had been murdered right around that time. Neither one of us had felt like celebrating anything then.
I skirted around a janitor who was mopping the linoleum floor. The sun slanting in through the windows made the smooth surface gleam like a new penny, but the longer I stared at the drying streaks of water, the darker they became, turning a dull, rusty red and morphing into another liquid. Blood. Fletcher’s blood, oozing all over the blue and pink pig tracks on the floor of the Pork Pit—
“Gin?” Owen asked. “Are you still there?”
I shook my head to get rid of the unwanted memories. “Sorry, I’m still in one of the buildings. The reception is terrible in here. Hang on a second, and let me go outside.”
I reached the end of the corridor and pushed through the doors, stepping out onto one of the quads at Ashland Community College. Stone buildings ringed the open grassy space, and a couple of maples towered up out of the ground, their red- and orange-streaked leaves providing patches of dappled shade that danced over the lawn. After the intense air-conditioning inside the building, the humid heat of the September evening felt like a warm, welcome blanket wrapping around my body. I tilted my face up to the sun, enjoying the sensation, before it turned into the inevitable, muggy, stifling burn.
Students moved back and forth across the quad, staring at their phones as they headed to other buildings or stepped onto the cobblestone paths that wound through campus and over to the parking lots. It was after seven now, and this was the last class period of the day, so everyone was ready to go somewhere else for the night, whether it was to the library to study, home to Mom and Dad’s to do laundry, or to a nearby bar to soak their overworked brain cells in enough alcohol to make them forget everything they’d learned today.
I stopped long enough to heft my backpack, with its pens, notebook, and copy of You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming, a little higher on my shoulder. The book was for the spy-literature course I was taking. I liked learning new things, so I was something of a perpetual student at the college, always signing up for a class or two every session. When I was younger, the classes had helped kill the time between my assignments as the assassin the Spider. Now the classes helped kill the time between people trying to murder me because I was the Spider. Funny how much my life had changed in the last year.
“Gin?” Owen asked again. “Are you still there?”
I meandered toward the parking lot where my car was. “Anyway, as I was saying, every year, I beg and plead for Finn to forget about throwing me any sort of party, and he always pays absolutely no attention to me whatsoever.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?”
I snorted. “You can try, but he won’t listen.”
Owen laughed. “Yeah, probably not.”
“Just try to rein him in a little bit, okay? I don’t need some enormous party with streamers and balloons and stuff. A nice, quiet dinner with you, Finn, and Bria would be great.”
“Streamers and balloons? Sounds like he really goes all out,” Owen teased.
“You have no idea,” I grumbled again. “Those parties?”
“Yeah . . .”
“One of them featured a petting zoo. Finn rented a bouncy house for the other one. Set it up on the lawn outside Fletcher’s house. I came home from work one day, and surprise!”
Owen laughed again at my snarky tone. “I’ll see what I can do.”
We started chatting about other things, and I let his voice wash over me, enjoying the deep, familiar rumble of his words. All the while, though, I focused on my surroundings, scanning the quads, peering into doorways, and easing around corners in case anyone was lying in wait for me. A vampire baring his fangs in anticipation of sinking his incisors into me. A giant flexing her hands, eager to wrap them around my throat and strangle me. A dwarf rolling his shoulders, ready to tackle me and beat my head against the ground. A Fire elemental cupping flames in the palm of her hand, preparing to roast me with her magic.